"Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability….We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation." Thomas A Edison

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Month: June 2017

My game yesterday finished quickly, but at the same time I stayed at the club until 1am looking at other people’s games, involved in post-mortems, and even went over three of Morphy’s games in the lobby with Mike and Will.

Today, I was more exhausted than I realized, a little nervous from the day, and also thinking I could take this game lightly, which I never do. After the game, I blamed my missed moves on the blue-board (me and DuWayne are two players who have horrible records on blue-squared boards – he refuses to play on them). I think I can handle any color other than blue, it’s such a passive color that I don’t notice the threats like I do on a pink, green, red, brown, black board.

At the board, I was seeing a lot quickly, which has been a trend for me recently, but this time I had that “Teacher, my brain is full!” feeling. I would see so much on a move, and then just want to move, even taking into account my opponent’s lower-rating, which I tell myself never to do “just play chess, don’t think about the opponent.”

9…fxe5. My blitz instinct was to play 10.Bxf5 and looked at 10…Qf6, (at first, I looked at defending the Bf5)11.BxNd7+ KxB, 12.0-0? (not wanting to give the f-file to his queen) e4, and didn’t like it, but 12.fxe (Black’s queen has the f-file for a moment, but so what?). Then I played 10.fxe without really even looking at it, and then noticed the check while I was making my move.

15.Bxf5?? I had calculated that both 15.Bxg3 and 15.hxg3 were both safe, but with my sort of “anything wins” mindset going into this game, thought that maybe I should have double-checked this move as soon as I picked up my bishop. She instantly snapped off my bishop like a pro, even clunking the pieces together as if to chop wood. In this game, Shirley played, and spotted, all of the tactical moves quickly, like a pro, and only got bogged down when she needed to think strategically/positionally. If every move were a tactic, I feel she would have kept it up all game long. In my mind, I was going to play 16.Bf5-g6+, but that bishop got gobbled up instantly, before it could do that.

Recently, I’ve noticed my biggest issue with tactics is spotting the simple “one-movers” I do hard tactics problems on ChessTempo sometimes, but because they are so hard I don’t do that many of them! Someone doing tactics on chess.com, which specializes in the easy-tactics, will increase their board-sight for these simple tactical details, but I don’t have a paid subscription there, and should probably switch to a book with some simple tactics, or just hanging piece exercises.

I felt 22.Rf7 was not a good move, but I am just playing for tricks here. The position is like -7 or -8, so even the computer starts offering ridiculous move suggestions.

I played 23.Rfe1 because …Nc5, Qc7 Qxe6 wins my passed-pawn, but I didn’t notice how it wasn’t defending e6 after all, and she snatched it instantly. Truth be told, I wanted to play 23.h4 here already but couldn’t because of 23…Nc5 winning the e6 pawn.

27…Qd2??. 28.Re2? Played a-la-tempo as I had this response sort of pre-programmed in, but no sooner had I played it, the thought occurred to me “What about 18.RxBf8+?”, then realized this was winning, which I demonstrated to Sara after the game when she asked about this move (she saw the moves, like instantly, at the same time I did). Unfortunately, Shirley played the expected response 28…Qg5, which cuts out this tactic. Here, I knew I had blown it because I was feeling the effects of exhaustion, so I played the move I had determined I was going to play in this line 29.Qxb7, since doubling the rooks didn’t seem to be a real solution. I guess my quick moves had worked by now, as she played 29…Rc8 much more quickly than she usually moves when defending. She sort of did that jump up and look around instant shock reaction when I took her rook (Imre did this same sort of thing when I checkmated him last week) I told her after the game I was expecting a three-fold repetition after 29…Rd8, 30.Qxc6+ Rd7, 30.Qa8+ Rd8, 31.Qc6+.

Well, all’s well that ends well, I guess. hehe. My rating barely moved at all this month – it went from 1834 to 1832. Real signs of stability. hehe.

I’ve gone over this game blindfold-style, and hxg3 is the obvious move, since the bishop controls e3, and the h-file is an asset. During the game, I tell myself to wait one more move before taking on f5, but then forgot why. I also saw that after hxg3 she won’t be able to play Qg4. During the game, I was perturbed over the possibility of playing …g5. Even then I didn’t see that 15.hxg3…Rxh1, 16.RxR g5, 17.Bxg5 Qxe5, 18.QxQ NxQ, 19.Re1 is a pin … Bd6, 20.Bf4 and then either …Nf7 or don’t even bother and pin back with …Re8. Missed this line. Also, missed that 18.Qh5+! is +10. Immediately, the queen wins the g5 pawn, so that Bg5 doesn’t take it, and then all of White’s forces get involved in an attack on Black’s king. Completely missed all this by not analyzing deeply enough. 15.hxg3 looks like an instant recapture, and Daniel suggested it after the game as if it were completely obvious, and it was the most obvious to me too, but that move right there, with both of us having over an hour on our clocks still, was the time to chart the next few moves. One could play the right move through educated guess, but that is not what chess strength is, you have to be able to analyze continuations OTB and not just “_play_ chess”.

I added the following to temposchlucker’s blog:

When it comes to visualizing, one has to give a position meaning, otherwise it’s like Temposhuckler’s analogy of not visualizing the coffee-pot (because it has no meaning, unlike a person’s face for instance).

When people try to visualize, there is a good chance they go about it the wrong way. You have to learn the board, think about the squares and diagonals without trying to “visualize” them. The visual part will come when your mind is filling in the gaps subconsciously. The trick is to give, find, explore the meaning of the position rather than try to “visualize” it. People naturally want the empty calories, they want to visualize without giving a position any particular meaning, which is nearly impossible for most people, much like how Temposchlucker says our bodies weren’t naturally adapted to do it.

The saying “You can’t have something for nothing” is even more true when it applies to chess. Once you analyze and understand a position blindfolded, then you will see it much more clearly. Unfortunately, I have found it very difficult to compress this process into a short period of time; i.e., blindfold blitz.

True to form, Mike played a line which was new for me, but he said he had played it in online blitz games a couple times before. He said he saw his mistake right away, but it took a couple minutes for me to find.

Technically, this is the shortest games in moves (8) and minutes off my clock (6); however, this wasn’t a worst game or such a badly played game on my opponent’s part since he only made one blunder (the queen), and resigned. After the game, I told him that I had not considered his recapture of the pawn from a positional standpoint, since he is behind in development and it doesn’t further his attack (if I had played, let’s say, …Bd7 instead of …NxNd4 – naturally, I wasn’t going to let him double my pawns on c6 here).

(Note: OTB means Over-The-Board, as in while playing a rated game in person. “Classical chess” means slow chess played OTB for a rating.)

I’ve spent the last year in particular mostly studying chess, so I’d like to add to your conclusion as well.

The tough Chesstempo problems, and visualization training (of course, these are all done in spots over the year, and not all the time by any means – except for hopefully OTB) have helped quite a bit. I would say that it helped tremendously, except that it overlapped the same skill I was already strong at, just made it stronger.

First, I’d like to preface by saying that there is a lag between training time spent, and when those results kick in consistently OTB.

Okay, deep breath, here is where all this training and results get separated. The number one thing to understand above all other things, for the moment, is that quick-chess and classical chess are simply not the same thing – perhaps for the elite some (Expert and above), but not for most. Okay, it’s already getting annoying having this Grand Chess Tour in Paris right now where it’s all rapid. Carlsen’s last tournament, Altibox in Norway, he went 8/10 blitz, and then with the same GMs he went 4.5/9 in classical chess – it’s even a common occurrence where a player will flag (a loss when time expires) in an equal position, in blitz. (note: Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, is the current World Champion at chess)

The only way to know if these techniques and exercises have worked is to use them in slow, classical chess. I don’t know about your online blitz rating, but mine doesn’t improve and, if you have been studying the way I have, then yours “shouldn’t” improve either. This is not bad, in fact it’s mostly a good thing. If I had to play my average blitz opponent who beats me in online chess, I would probably destroy the lot of them in an OTB, classical time-control setting. These opponents are quite talented, and imaginative tactically, and yes their winning continuations do actually work, but it’s like a gunfight where you can be accurate but if the other guy gets the gun out of the holster first….and yes Classical chess slows all of this down for the stronger player, it’s like letting the slower player get the gun out of the holster first.

Eventually, my blitz skill may close the gap with my OTB skill, but that probably wouldn’t be for many years (and I’m already 50, not a spring-chicken). There is a reason for this gap, but it’s like the difference between playing a 100%, full-strength, no clock, blindfold game, and then doing the same thing except at blitz speed. In any case, blitz-chess should mainly be used for training on lines you don’t know, or to tone up your game before a tournament.

Anyway, now that that’s all out of the way, let’s talk classical chess. It is important to arrive at the game in some kind of decent shape. If you just busted your @ss moving furniture for three days, and then try to play a classical game on that day, then your physical stamina may collapse at an inopportune time. It’s sort of like bad-business, except here it applies to your chess “skill”.

Lastly, and most importantly, the Chesstempo and blindfold training does help with classical OTB chess. 1) When something unexpected happens at the board, you will be far more ready for it. 2) You will look at more lines deeply with more permutations. Depth is often a killer below the Expert level. Experts rarely make mistakes of a depth nature – they usually either do or don’t see the right idea. At the Class level, depth is a killer because Class players often do see the right lines, but _don’t_ have the ability to see them far enough for it to count. So, the Class player typically makes a weak move instead in order to avoid a wrong calculation. This is where a lot of the training we are doing should help.

Yes, it is all about patterns in a way, but if you are overly focused on solving tactics at blitz speed, and only concerned about memorizing patterns, well, let me just say that I don’t think chess works that way, as I like everyone else has tried that before at some point, in some way, and it didn’t work for me. Simple one-move mates could be solved at blitz-speed, and one guy used to do this as his pre-game warmup, but this is not the same thing as “solving” tactics. The biggest difference between blitz and classical chess is when it comes to _solving_ problems. In blitz, it’s at most 2 minutes, and then the clock in your head tells you to move. For me, a typical number would be 6 minutes in classical chess (longer than a blitz game) to solve a problem before I start getting antzy and just wanting to move – naturally, if I’ve spent time on the previous move, where I had mostly solved the same problem, then I would be itching to spend less time on that next move (whether right or wrong to).

I’ll get off the soapbox of my results here, but I really want to stress that the difference between time-controls (and this group generally gets this) is in the quality of _solving_ problems. Quick-chess is more of an I.Q. test than a chess test. Some of us slow-thinkers, I believe, can be talented in a way that we can bring more mental resources to bear on a problem, should we learn to think a more structured way because we naturally have a way our brains work when it comes to solving deeper problems.

Nevertheless, deep problems are not solved at quick-speeds (although one could speed up their solving of deep problems). It’s a little sad that chess, of all endeavors, has been subjected to this information age pressure of pre-digested information (lines, results, etc.). Running these blitz tournaments the night before a regular tournament may be somewhat of a tradition, may appeal to fans and even the ego of the players, an ability unique to them which they can showcase, but in my view, it’s not the same thing, it’s mostly garbage-chess, or even a chess IQ test where there is no time to think, you simply have to “know”, ahead of time.

I don’t know for how many of you, your big thing is OTB, or postal, or online blitz, or casual chess etc. My big thing is OTB chess. I’ve spent a lot of time studying games in books, and my rating went up mostly as a result of calculation ability, before I realized tactical “patterns” were such a big thing – my chess, and even book-collecting, predates the internet, as I used to subscribe to all kinds of chess catalogues back then through the mail. The point I feel I am trying to make is that a site like Chesstempo can improve my strength quite a bit (just got four in a row correct, last one taking 18 minutes!).

The current generation, however, is different. They are getting their strength mostly from studying tactics (the opposite of how I started), blitz chess, playing a lot of chess in locales where the titled players play and hang out, and playing lots of blitz with Experts and Masters. I’ll sneer and say this is a bit of the sleazy approach, dropping off their kids to be “babbysat” by Experts and Masters. Surely, adult chessplayers don’t get quite this level of TLC on average!

Nevertheless, for me tactics helps, and even formally studying endgames, really, because it’s the opposite of where I started from. I never got too much into the formal study of openings, either, but that’s sort of a side-point when it comes to ratings because I can play certain lines (not always, the English Opening is a good exception to this for me) where I have quite a bit of experience built up.

In my 7 1/2 years in Colorado, I’ve seen chess-playing kids grow up, go through High School and off to college. They’ve often started out at the bottom, 1100, 1300, I even remember when they were proud to make 1300. They played in the Denver Opens, made Class A, or even more frequently Expert, or even Master. Calvin aside, there is no current generation of kids that play weeknight chess in Colorado Springs – perhaps one or two come to mind, but they stopped coming. We still get the occassional person who makes a one-time appearance at the the CO Springs Chess Club, often they are just visiting from out of town.

It’s known here in the Springs that all of the Denny’s restaurants were shut down, and so we lost that venue as a playing site. We only had two games going on tonight at Smashburgers, so Wednesday is likely to disappear. The Williams kids are the promise of the chess future here in the Springs, but they haven’t started their chess club up yet, and are now talking opening it up in late July. Next month, the Springs chess club is having a G/30, dual-rated tournament. I’m not even sure whether I will go to that one, but either way there is no standard Swiss G/90, Inc 30 next month at the CO Springs Chess Club. Next week is sort of like the last normal week, well Wednesday I’ll get paired with a 1000 rated player unless someone new joins in the last round.

Well, with all that said, me and Dean played another heck of an endgame. He shines there, and really made me work for it.

This was not a particularly well-played game of mine. By the end of the game, we were both tired and making errors, but it’s the first time that I’ve play Bird’s Opening in a rated game, and it also happens to have been my dad’s middle name. If I had thought about this before, I probably would have studied it before I played it, and would have played a lot better than this, but he of all people would understand that you have to show up, give it your shot, and finish the game.

20.Nd6 I realized trading rooks was probably better, but I wanted to up the chance of a blunder here so that the game wouldn’t drag out as long.

27.Ke2? The first blunder, after 27…RxNd6, I didn’t even see (Dean was already yawning a move or so earlier), and was mainly trying to get the game over with, so when I saw the tactic it didn’t phase me at all. Perhaps for a few seconds I was thinking it might work for him, but I felt reassured that it was a tactic from an inferior position (those usually don’t work), and that we would be getting more pieces off the board this way.

As I played 29.d7, I was worried about the reply 29….Bf6, but had dismissed it because I hadn’t seen the …Nc3+ fork in the position after 30.e8(Q)+ BxQ, 31.e4 Nc3+ (although I had seen this fork in the other lines).

Before I decided I wanted my king on e2 to stop the rook from invading on the d-file, I was planning to play 27.e4 Ne7, 28.Rc1 and now Houdini wants to play …f5 or …f6, which I instantly respond with 29.exf Bxf6, 30.BxB RxB, 31.Rc7 Ng8, 32.Be5 Rd3+, 33.Ke3 Rxh2, 34.Bd6+ Ke8, 35.Kd4 Rd2+, 36.Ke5 (with Kxe6 happening). Even after 28…Rb8, I was planning on playing Bd4, and 29.Rc7 first is the accurate way to go about this. It’s kind of ironic that, if I am playing very well, no human or super-computer should be able to prevent me from winning this position. Not even a difficult feat, just goes to show how I was limping through this game.

37.Ke4 I played this move with a crowd around our board, but as soon as my hand came off the clock, I realized his threat was to take on f4. He played his previous move quickly, so I knew he was up to something, but noticed it a bit too late.

39….f5+ Me and Bozhenov were expecting 39…Kf7 here, when 40.Rxh6 would get the rook trapped (since he spent so long on this move). Ironically, he played the best move, since after 39….Kf7, 40.Rh7+ followed by 41.Rb7 is supposed to be alright for White.

41…Kf7?? Effectively ending the game, and I was glad to see it. I was tired mostly because I hadn’t eaten many carbs all day, just fruit, salad, protein, so I wasn’t in the mood so much for the whole endgame battle/lesson thing, I sort of just wanted to end it here. Naturally, I was expecting 41…Kd5, or at least 41…b5, something with some effort.

So, this is a good example of a higher-rated player winning a game on not much knowledge or energy. 😉

I played Imre tonight, as he was free because Alex worked late and forgot to show up for his match with Imre (So now Imre has two matches going on).

Time-controls were the usual G/90, 30 sec inc, and for a change I finished this game with ten minutes on my clock, as well as having spent most of my time in the endgame.

For 13 moves we followed theory until only one game was left in the DB with 13.Nf3. I didn’t think I was likely to win this game until he played 33.Kh1? followed by 34.Nh2?? In both cases he should have played Ne5, and then we may have maneuvered for a while, and it could have been a tough draw.

I saw 38…c3, sacrificing the bishop on f6, almost right away, but decided not to because it could lead to a rook vs. knight ending, and by keeping the tension instead I figured there was a better chance of winning a whole piece.

Wow. Imre made me play out some endgames if a different final move were played – sort of exhausting on the nerves, yet a very interesting game with plenty to study from, I’m sure. I’ve never played this Bg5 Najdorf line in a rated game OTB before. Bc4 has low stats, instead f4 there has better stats. I was down to 16 seconds on my clock at one point, and he had close to an hour.

My week after the Denver Open has been hectic. Monday through Wednesday I was moving heavy furniture all day, and had not been looking at chess, nor even have I had time to plug my games in from that tournament. On Tuesday I was super out of it when I went to the club, and I was 23 minutes late to Wednesdays game (23 minutes late to Tuesdays game as well) as I drank my first cup of coffee for the day right before I left to play.

12.Qe2 I wasn’t pleased with this move as the only reason I didn’t play 12.Qe1, was because he hadn’t castled, but it was still Houdini’s top move. I should have played Be3 and Qe1.

17…Nc4 (stops Bb6).

18.e5 Here, I wanted to play a desperado, with the aim of ensuring a draw, since I have had my starting time on the clock markedly reduced. After the game, I pointed out that I would have played correctly 18.Nd2 to protect f4, which I saw at the time.

22…Bxg2+ This is winning, but I didn’t see it until the moment after I played Ng5. Other moves are no better than equal for Black.

23.Nxh3+ This is the move that I was looking at too, but it took me a while to process that he will be two pawns up.

25…e5. Here I could resign, I figured. It’s funny how I missed this …e5 idea, but I did account for earlier during my drawing combination, which incidentally does work if it hadn’t been for the 22…Bxg2+(protected) move.

40.Qh5 I dropped the bishop, although 40.Qg6 Rc2, 41.Qe8+ Kh7, 42.Qh5+ Bh6 is just as convincing.

All in all, I need to see that move 22…Bxg2+ more quickly. When I am not fresh, I find it more difficult to find my opponent’s moves (even at the board, I felt it difficult to look for his moves, because it requires that extra bit of mental energy level/freshness/clear-headedness). Unusual positions, prophylaxis, defense, sustained tension in the position, these are all things more difficult to cope with when you are not physically 100% going in there – Tuesdays game and result was a reflection of these things as well.

17…e4?? was simply a blunder from my physical state. I knew I was okay here, objectively, but my nerves finally gave out from having done so many things all day before the game, and then the game itself. I leaned back from the board as I reached to press the clock, and to my horror realized that the rook is no longer on e8. From here, I played at least as poorly as the blunder itself. In both of my games this week, I felt too fatigued/unrelaxed to blindfold the position as much as I usually would. It takes a certain physical relaxation sometime before, and during the game, to be able to blindfold, like you have to get a bit quiet within yourself to really be able to do it.

In any case, I got some more OTB game experience in, and learning material from this week’s games. It’s worth noting in my game with Paul that no material had been traded after 17 moves when I finally blundered, and he said later that he had gotten a nap in before the game. So, I feel that he maximized both his physical (I got there late), and clock advantage during this game, not to mention the tension, and quality of position as I didn’t get too much of his time to think, and so didn’t chose anything committal such as …d5, which I had opportunities to play.